The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (26 page)

A soldier ordered the weary transports to silence as they entered the stone enclave deep in the valley of shadows. Once inside, the women and children stood for hours in a long line wrapping around Yard One. While they awaited inspection and processing, an unofficial, albeit persistent, welcoming committee beckoned, bartering for clothing or jewelry in exchange for tobacco, soap, and other forbidden prison luxuries. They appeared one by one from a mysterious passage to whatever lay behind Cascades’ inner walls.

The women working in Yard One seemed a strange combination of the defiant and the defeated. Some bore the appearance of caged animals, seemingly tamed yet ready to turn on the captors incapable of extinguishing their raging spirit. Others ambled about at random, evidently terribly out of sorts. The ashen figures moved in slow, deliberate, and strangely silent motion. Ludlow’s instincts told her that something was disturbingly amiss. She looked at Arabella and drew her closer still. Mother and daughter eventually inched toward the front of the line and were summoned into a small, dimly lit room.

Matron Hutchinson handed Ludlow a clean Female Factory uniform but offered no clothing for Arabella. Mr. Hutchinson had already perused the thick black volume recording Mrs. Tedder’s literacy and good conduct aboard the
Hindostan
. Nurse, cook, housekeeper, and mother, she exceeded the expectations for a petty thief. Towering over the slight widow, the stodgy superintendent informed her that she was assigned to the new prison nursery on Liverpool Street back in the town’s center. Nothing was said about Arabella, and Ludlow dared not inquire. As for herself, she had just received the most favorable work assignment a prisoner could expect.

It was nearly half past six by the time all the
Hindostan
transports were processed. Before clanging the supper bell, Deputy Matron Cato assigned Ludlow to a mess of twelve. Arabella was content to follow her mum’s lead and dunked her allotment of brown bread into the watery soup. At seven o’clock, Mrs. Hutchinson rang the prison bell for evening chapel, held an hour earlier than during the summer schedule. Mother Tedder took her little girl’s hand as they walked toward the modest sanctuary and took a seat before the overstuffed Reverend Bedford. Her first night in the valley, Ludlow prayed for many miracles. As the Southern Cross fell behind Mt. Wellington’s black shadow, she draped an arm around Arabella’s waist. Before she knew it, mother and child lay snuggled asleep in a hammock that barely cleared the floor under their weight.

Morning muster was at six o’clock in the spring. Ludlow lined up for daily inspection in Yard One while Arabella peeked around from behind her. All shades of green burst across Mt. Wellington, and daffodils danced around its base. Soft pink apple blossoms and cherry trees in shades of dusty rose dotted the hilly farmland Ludlow could smell beyond the prison walls. Most of the women knew little about geography other than that they had been sent “beyond the seas.” The reversed seasons were no doubt a source of confusion as they witnessed their first September spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

This time of year, Cascades convict veterans worked an extended morning session from six thirty until eight A.M. The bells rang for a half-hour breakfast break, and then it was off to chapel for morning prayers before the workday began again in earnest. Reverend Bedford and supporters among the colony’s elite believed that forced labor redeemed the body’s worth, if not the soul’s. His captive congregation had little patience for his rather theatrical hissing and spitting from the pulpit. Twice daily, the aptly labeled Holy Willie chastised them for their evil ways and exhorted the virtues of industry for opening a window on redemption.

Widow Tedder’s atonement commenced officially after morning chapel. Tapping her foot on the chapel steps, Mrs. Cato impatiently jingled the bell that seemed permanently attached to her palm and summoned #151 to her side. Deputy Matron Cato was charged with escorting prisoners assigned to the Liverpool Street nursery. It was already half past eight; there was not a moment to waste in putting each woman to work. Performing her duty as prison midwife, Mrs. Cato had helped deliver many of the tiny babies now lodged in the new nursery.

Liverpool Street had opened only a year before in response to a newspaper exposé about the atrocious conditions at the Cascades nursery, named the “Valley of the Shadow of Death” by the
Colonial Times
.
¹⁵
Inside the Female Factory walls, at least twenty infants died during the first three months of 1838.
¹⁶
Authorities had failed to acknowledge that malnutrition and illness had raised the infant mortality rate to four times that of the colony’s free settlers. Instead, they blamed the convict mothers, accusing them of deliberately keeping their children near death in order to be with them in the nursery rather than returning to hard labor in Yard Two.

Matron Hutchinson herself understood the devastation of losing a child. She had given birth to twelve children, and six had died in infancy, at least four at the Female Factory.
¹⁷
During her nineteen years at Cascades, a severely limited and largely untrained staff helped her manage the perpetually damp, overcrowded prison, where medical care was meager. Not surprisingly, the thinly stretched Mrs. Hutchinson received mixed reviews. Though the prisoners appeared to tolerate her more readily than they did her bureaucratic husband, the press cast her as a villain when it exposed a scandal at the prison.

Public outrage reached a boiling point with the case of Mary Vowles. The Irish lass had freely immigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in August 1832, two months later marrying an emancipist. In 1835, working as a servant, she was caught stealing a silver plate in Hobart Town and sentenced to seven years at Cascades. In 1838, the twenty-nine-year-old was charged with using bad language toward another woman and sentenced to six weeks’ hard labor at the Female Factory. Appearing before Mr. Hutchinson with her son, Thomas, in her arms, she pleaded to keep the twelve-month-old with her because he was still nursing. Superintendent of Convicts Josiah Spode had already approved the request to keep Thomas with her, but it made no difference. Deputy Matron Cato also implored Mr. Hutchinson not to separate mother from suckling child. Again, he refused.

Five days after her admission to the Female Factory, Mary was allowed to visit her son in the prison nursery. “She did not know her own child, ‘it was so sickly looking, and altered so much for the worse!’”
¹⁸
A few days later, the nurse sent Mary a message asking for money to buy Thomas sago, a starch derived from palm trees that was mixed with wine to treat ill infants. Upon receiving news of her son’s worsening condition, Mary asked Mr. Hutchinson for permission to visit the dying child. When he said no, the frantic mother ran toward the nursery but was detained and sentenced to solitary confinement. Somehow, she managed a message to her husband, who came to Cascades and left with their child. He purchased medicine from a pharmacist, but by now little Thomas was at death’s door and soon succumbed.

Little Thomas Vowles was just one of hundreds who suffered the same fate at the nursery. Word began to spread throughout Hobart Town that “the corpses of children had been conveyed secretly out of the Factory, without the slightest regard to ceremony.”
¹⁹
The
True Colonist
harshly criticized Superintendent Hutchinson’s role in Thomas’s demise, assailing him for an improper use of authority. Such heartlessness prompted Hobart Town’s local newspaper to launch a crusade for change. On May 29, 1838, the
Colonial Times
reported yet another death inside Cascades and called for the resignation of the superintendent’s wife.

“Where, again, was the matron, Mrs. Hutchinson, that she did not perceive the gradual decay and drooping of this innocent victim? Is it . . . because Mrs. Hutchinson is so habituated to misery and wretchedness, within the walls of that gloomy prison, that she does not recognize its continual existence? At all events, her removal is certainly requisite, immediately and promptly.”
²⁰

The article went on to beg Governor John Franklin “to ORDER the immediate removal of the children, and not to stand upon any shillyshally remonstrance as to expense or inconvenience.”
²¹
Despite public outcry about “the perilous and fatal Nursery,” the governor’s wife, Lady Jane, largely ignored the dying babies.
²²
Constructing a botanical garden, a state college, and a museum of natural history modeled after a Greek temple were the tasks she readily performed from an elite distance. Writing her sister during the time of the scandal, the governor’s wife revealed her true feelings: “As for doing anything with the women here, in the factory, it seems next to impossible huddled as they all are together, and such impudent creatures, almost all of them. . . . I think the whole system of female transportation . . . so faulty and vicious, that to attempt to deal with the women who are the subjects of it, seems a waste of time and labor.
²³

In this instance, public sentiment held more influence over the governor than did his apathetic wife. After nine years of scandals involving infant deaths, he finally approved the closing of Cascades Nursery in October 1838, motivated by economics rather than altruism. The nursery was relocated to the small Liverpool Street house in Hobart Town. Mindful of both finances and public relations, the Hobart Town coroner had “recommended that a new hospital and nursery be built close to, but outside, the Factory, in order to avoid the necessity of holding an inquest on every death therein. This would minimize administrative expense and avoid ‘excit[ing] . . . the Public Mind’ through inquests being held on ‘ordinary and unavoidable cases.’”
²⁴
According to an act of Parliament, inquests were required only for those who died inside a prison.

Nurse Tedder was about to enter the poorly ventilated little dwelling on Liverpool Street that now held Cascades’ tiniest prisoners. It was no place for the faint of heart. Walking down the valley toward the center of town, Arabella held tight to her mother’s new prison dress and followed Mrs. Cato’s directions to behave herself. This was where proper people lived, and children should be seen and not heard. Strolling by the replicas of English gardens, the ladies of Hobart Town wore black lace dresses embellished with pearl buttons, and white cambric collars and cuffs. Following fashion and imitating the coiffures of Parisians, they swept their hair off the face and styled it into soft curls.
²⁵

The town was built primarily on a straight grid, its long streets adorned by simple Georgian architecture. Behind the neatly trimmed Hawthorne hedges, private homes and government offices conveyed a gaol-like austerity, with squared bricks and severe edges. Lurking around the corner in the less tasteful side alleys, sly-grog shops enjoyed a booming business. Emancipists, as the freed convicts were known, congregated with sailors, bushrangers, madams, and corrupt government officers. For the most part, the town still tolerated an “anything goes” in a penal colony attitude. Unlicensed pubs abounded, serving homemade liquor, sometimes dangerously laced with laudanum—the same drug used to quiet infants in Britain’s slums.

Set amid bawdy houses, taverns, shops, and mansions, the Liverpool Nursery sat at the lower end of the street. Prisoners whose babies were not yet six months old were permitted to nurse their little ones. Some would later be assigned to colonists as wet nurses. Though not nearly as damp as Cascades, the new location was equally crowded, chaotic, and malodorous. A doctor passed through occasionally, but the prisoners themselves were assigned responsibility for fragile babies and scrawny toddlers ranging in age from six months to two years.

Ludlow’s hands-on medical training aboard the
Hindostan
, alongside an excellent recommendation from the surgeon superintendent, immediately moved her into the nursery’s top spot. Once again, a basic education and literacy led Ludlow to the best assignment among undesirable alternatives. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing, could insulate Ludlow from the harsh and unanticipated reality she was about to face. Back at Cascades for supper, Mrs. Hutchinson asked Widow Tedder to step into her reception room for a private conversation. The matron told Ludlow that there was no place at the Female Factory for Arabella. Her ten-year-old daughter would be transferred to the Queen’s Orphanage in Hobart Town within a week.

Typically, mothers were given no warning about their children’s removal.
²⁶
But in this case, Mrs. Hutchinson needed a well-trained nurse on her side, and she could ill afford to alienate her. If Ludlow maintained her exemplary behavior, she’d be allowed to make the four-mile walk and visit Arabella once a month, on Sunday. Ludlow listened silently while her heart sank at the prospect of losing another child. Behind her hazel eyes, nearly covered by her mob cap, her mind raced madly ahead, plotting schemes for an escape.

The next six days were a nightmare. The distraught mother decided to shield her darling little girl from the news of their imminent separation until the moment was upon them. Inside the Liverpool Nursery, there was hardly time to think. An overwhelming workload pulled Ludlow through the fear and dread that rose higher every hour. The
Hindostan
had arrived during another outbreak of influenza in the colony. The illness, in particular, targeted the fragile children crammed into the Liverpool Nursery, housing more than fifty women and nearly one hundred children. Within a week, the new nurse witnessed her first death in Van Diemen’s Land: Two-year-old Frederick Withely passed away September 17, 1839.